If you’ve been keeping up with the social media news scene, you’ve probably noticed a flurry of updates from Facebook and Twitter in recent weeks. If you haven’t been able to find the time to read up on all of them, don’t worry—each one signals good things for your social presence.

Facebook and Twitter didn’t become the biggest names in the game by sitting around, but by listening to their users in order to deliver the best user experience around. Hospital marketers can learn a lot from these changes as they seek to strengthen their brands, outperform their competitors, and attract prospective patients on social media because each one reflects what users really want to see when they go online or open up an app.

Some of the updates are more important to understand than others, so we’ll go through them one at a time. Let’s dive in, shall we?

These days, it’s hard to find a marketing blog post that doesn’t talk about brands. In the age of inbound marketing, public perception of an organization is often just as important as the products it sells.

There’s also a lot of talk about personal brands. Carving out your online identity and making it as strong as it can be is essential if you want future employers to find you and leave with a favorable impression. Having a killer resume used to be enough, but now you also need to optimize your LinkedIn profile and leverage your other social accounts if you want to maximize your chances of getting that next job.

All of that takes a lot of time, so unless you’ve learned how to live without sleep, there are probably aspects of your personal brand that could stand to be improved. One such aspect for many marketers is their Twitter account.

These days, maintaining your hospital’s social media presence can be a daunting task.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn—they’re all vying for your time, and each one is a useful marketing tool in its own way. So many social networks give you as many opportunities to promote your hospital’s content, but there’s a lot to keep track of if you don’t have a full-time social media person on your team.

One of the most common questions hospital marketers have about social media—much like blogging—is just how often they should post on each social network. Every network has its own best practices, so it’s important to have an individualized plan for each one.

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. The 300 million active monthly Instagram users around the world would undoubtedly agree.

The popular photo-sharing app now boasts twice as many users as it did just a year and a half ago. 26% of all adult Internet users use Instagram, and it’s not only young people—nearly half of its users are over the age of 30. Those users share 70 million photos per day and double tap a photo to like it 2.5 billion times per day.

For a while now consultants in the SEO world have been discussing to what extent social media influences a website’s page rank in search engines.

In one experiment documented by Quicksprout, an SEO expert created six different websites in the same niche and monitored how their rankings could be shifted by different social cues. He looked at Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

The most valuable social engagement, it seemed, was the addition of new Google+ followers. One site saw a jump of 14% in ranking by adding 100 new fans on their Google business listing. Another site experienced a double-digit ranking surge from receiving 300 +1’s on Google+.

The majority of small business owners would probably describe their social media campaign with one word: frustrating.

It’s not that engaging in social media is difficult. It’s not. In fact, all of the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest) are very user-friendly, even for the less than computer savvy. It’s that running a campaign and successfully registering results are two completely different animals.

Many small businesses are frustrated with social media marketing because they’re not getting the results they hoped for.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” said Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli (depending on who you want to attribute this to.) So it seems with data about the age of Facebook users and particularly the “mass exodus” of young people from the platform. Research from Forrestor contradicts data from Pew and shows that young people are in fact still avidly using Facebook.

Forrestor surveyed over 4,000 teenagers (aged between 12 and 17) about their use of social media and which services they use the most. Facebook came out ahead–by a sizeable margin (see chart below.)

I’m getting “old’ish” (my kids would say “old” but I’d like to keep things in perspective).

I noticed my age when my colleagues and I were discussing which social media sites our clients should use. Several of my colleagues are ladies in their twenties and I’m a fellow in his late forties.

My colleagues were singing the praises of Instagram. And several times they repeated they “don’t use Facebook any more.” In my personal dealings I don’t use Instagram at all and Facebook infrequently but I’d consider myself somewhat of a “power user” of Linkedin.